The accurate description of a digital object is vital to its preservation, discovery, management and distribution. Even though a schema, such as, instance the Dublin Core may be used to provide a generally accepted standard for an “accurate description” of an object, the description is (intentionally) limited by the schema itself, to adhere to this standard and does not provide the possibility of either a very broad or very granular detailed description (metadata) of the object.
Cataloging schema also has inherited limitations. Information collected within a schema is limited by the subjective perspective of the cataloger or to the domain which the cataloger is a recognized expert. Although a domain expert may be a recognized with regard to a particular object or object type, he may not have an extensive knowledge of, for example, a historic perspective of the class to which the object type belongs. Additionally, the cataloging process itself may be strictly limited in scope perhaps due to limited resources; thus the policy adopted to catalog the objects may also be limiting by design.
Digital object representation is becoming increasing significant in the distribution of product information. That is to say, that the effective dissemination of information related to products (for instance through search engines) has become one of the primary means of its “distribution”, with the World Wide Web representing one of the primary channels of distribution of this information and a market of exchange for their information and commerce. This represents what can be called the “semantic market place”. So, as objects are now in part distributed through the effectiveness of their digital representations, the construction of these representations is becoming increasingly significant. With the advent of semantic technologies, which permit the extraction of this information and “reasoning” related to the information extracted, the construction of detailed semantic representations of digital objects (semantic digital objects or SDO) represents a significant challenge for ensuring an efficient distribution of digital object, for instance utilizing an improved organic search engine indexing and the objects retrieval by the next generation of semantic and meta-semantic search engines.
The inventive system, FIG. 1, described herein, addresses these issues with an application for a complete value chain for the creation of information enriched digital objects referred to here as “semantic digital objects” or SDO. The application implements a multi schematic and multi layered approach to metadata management ontologies, thesauri and controlled vocabularies to create poly-hierarchical semantic representations. This multi layered approach refers to a multi level object submission process, creating three “semantic” versions for each object. Also, described herein are two marketing methods referred to as semantic marketing methods, Semantic or Metasemantic Advertising and Quantistic Marketing, which utilizes the polyhierarchical semantic digital objects produced by the platform to provide and locate associated detailed product descriptions, such as information relating to a product's brand, company, cultural context, historical context, historic context, among others, or a combination thereof, and enhancing their representation to improve the likelihood of a potential consumer finding the product he wants to purchase or research. This list is not exclusive.